(Apologies in advance for any lack of coherence in the following post: I’m up in the middle of the night, semi-delirious from both the flu and NyQuil.)
A week or two ago, while thinking of movies like Saw and Hostel, I wondered aloud:
At what point does violence for violence’s sake cease to be a form of spectacle that reveals occulted meaning and become a sort of pornographic brutalization of the audience? Just a thought.
A few days ago Stacie Ponder found an article at the Delaware Journal asking much the same question: “Torture scenes go mainstream.” The article quotes Hostel director Eli Roth on the larger “meaning” of his film.
Some creators of torture-tinged projects say there is a message behind the madness, insisting that that they are illuminating larger themes and using torture to enrich their storytelling.
“Hostel” writer and director Eli Roth said he chose torture scenes to express his frustration over government and world affairs.
“Right now we’re at war, and then you have Hurricane Katrina, where there are people on roofs screaming for help,” said Roth. “I have this feeling that civilization could collapse, and that if you go overseas, you could get killed, that you could be in the middle of nowhere, and that someone could kill you and no one would find you. This film is also about the dark side of human nature. Everyone’s life has a price. I want the audience to feel guilty. I want them to feel sick to their stomach, but by the end they’re screaming for blood. Everyone has this evil within them.”
You’ll note that in Roth’s equation, a lot of different people (from the Bush Administration to horror-movie fans) are supposed to feel bad about themselves thanks to his movie; you’ll also note that Roth himself does not appear to be one of them. (UPDATE, in the cold light of morning: I’m still semi-incoherent so again my apologies, but am I too hard on Roth? I don’t really think so. Yes, he does say “Everyone has this evil within them” (emph. mine), but that’s as close as he comes to including himself in his opprobrium; his film seems to be squarely aimed at other, external targets, to judge from his quotes in the article.)
I found this interesting because I was already thinking about the effects of and intentions behind violence and evil in art this very afternoon when, excited for next month’s debut of the sixth season of The Sopranos, I watched the final two episodes of Season Five on DVD. I was instantly reminded of Slate’s mob-expert roundtable discussion of the series, which culminated in part in the discussion of the possible “meaning” behind Tony Soprano’s conduct. Lawyer Gerald Shargel (who famously represented John Gotti, among other Mafia clients) starts the discussion:
…once again, I see Mafia as metaphor. When Tony turns to Silvio Dante and says, “You don’t know what it’s like to be No. 1,” later telling Dr. Melfi that “all my choices were wrong,” I couldn’t help but think of Bush bursting into Iraq without an endgame, finding himself in an impossible mess. Tony knocks off his cousin Tony B.; Bush is forced to knock off George Tenet. Isn’t this the way of all failed leaders? Hubris and arrogance play rough.
Slate TV and film critic Dana Stevens concurs.
One more response to Shargel’s note: The Tony-as-Bush allegory only works up to a point because Tony’s smart and charismatic, a born leader. (Also, arguably, more morally conflicted than our president. How sad is that?)
However, New York/New Yorker/New York Times Magazine organized crime reporter Jeffrey Goldberg differs. After his suggestion that Stevens’ unfavorable comparison of Bush’s conduct in Iraq with Soprano’s conduct in the North Jersey rackets is not entirely fair is met with dismissal, he continues:
God forbid we should keep politics out of television criticism. Wait until you hear my Marxian critique of Gilmore Girls. What I was suggesting, inelegantly, was that not everything is about Iraq. Sometimes, a show about the New Jersey mob is a show about the New Jersey mob. Yes, of course, The Sopranos goes deeper, and darker, than any other drama on television (and darker, I’d argue, for argument’s sake, than even The Godfather), but I don’t see it as a ripped-from-the-headlines metaphoric commentary on whatever is bothering liberal American elites at the moment. And yes, of course, gangland dramas are always about something else as well